3DSL Parallel Add-on Module

Parallel Hardware Supported

3DSL® has a parallel compute option that is automatically activated if a 3dsl_parallel license is found. The parallel license puts no restrictions on the number of cores used by 3DSL®--this is user defined --meaning that running a 3DSL® deck on 2,4,8,16, or more cores always uses a single 3dsl_parallel license only. The parallel license is part of the Surveillance and Simulation Base packages.

Parallel Speedup Performance

However, how much faster 3DSL® will be when running on multiple cores it is not as simple as doubling CPU's will double speedup. The maximum speedup is related to the overall fraction of parallelized runtime code. Depending on your model physics, number of gridblocks, number of timesteps, and timestep size, determines the fraction of parallelized runtime code. See the chart below to give you a guide as to the speedup performance of 3DSL® as you add cores. Note that the greatest incremental gain in speedup is for a low number of CPU's. Regardless of model type, you can expect at least a 1.5X speedup in run time just by running 3DSL® on a dual-core system. But after about 6 cores, incremental speed gains deminish.

Speedup of 3DSL® parallel for various simulation models as number of CPU's increases. All results are for an Intel 8-core i9-9900K, 64GB, Win10, 3dsl-win-x64.2020.0415. For further details see SPE paper 118684.